Reputation Threats in Social Media: an Integrative Approach to Prevent Crisis Situations
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Reputation Threats in Social Media: An Integrative Approach to Prevent Crisis Situations Author: Nino Zufall University of Twente P.O. Box 217, 7500AE Enschede The Netherlands [email protected] ABSTRACT While social media has shifted organizational communication from one-way communication to free conversation, organizations have lost power to control what is being said about them in the world. This can lead to threats for an organization in many cases and many ways. The purpose of this research is to bring together established theories in crisis management, reputation management and social media communication about reaction strategies towards such reputation threats from social media users. This work covers a critical literature review of well-established theories in this research field, discusses them and comes up with universally applicable strategies. It was found that the established crisis communication theories still fit in the social media environment when minor adjustments are applied. Although the theories for crisis reactions already are being discussed for over 15 years, there is still a need for empirical evidence, especially when applied to the social media environment. The originality of this research is given by the creation of a transition from historical theories from crisis communication into a new environment of social media communication. The value of this research is the merger of knowledge from different management sciences into a new multidisciplinary science. Supervisors: Dr. E. Constantinides; ir J.W.L. van Benthem Keywords crisis communication, marketing, online reputation, public relations, reputation management, risk management, social media Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. 3rd IBA Bachelor Thesis Conference, July 3rd, 2014, Enschede, The Netherlands. Copyright 2014, University of Twente, Faculty of Management and Governance. 1. INTRODUCTION has proven to satisfy the demands for being securely Until the mid 1990s, reputation was a relatively wide and established. unsystematically researched topic for the field of business To fill this gap in existing management science, the following studies. There were several different definitions for several research problem will be answered in this paper: subfields of research (Fombrun & Riel, 1997). In 1996, How should commercial organizations deal with social media Fombrun and Rindova established an integrative definition for generated reputation threats and safeguard a stable corporate corporate reputation: “A corporate reputation is a collective image? representation of a firm’s past actions and results that describes the firm’s ability to deliver valued outcomes to multiples To answer this problem the following sub-questions will be stakeholders. It gauges a firm’s relative standing both internally discussed and answered while serving as a golden thread. with employees and externally with its stakeholders, in both its 1. What are the elements of social media and how can they competitive and institutional environments”. Fombrun and affect organizations? Rindova (1996) further mention that reputation is a “fragile intangible asset”. While assets of organizations are managed, 2. What are reputation threats in social media? Fombrun considerably contributed to the establishment of 3. How can reputation threats be identified and categorized? reputation management as a science. Although the science of 4. How should companies react to threats? reputation management is relatively young compared to other research fields, it already has experienced a dramatic and It will do so with an application of theoretical knowledge ground-breaking change since the beginning of the 21st century. gained from a critical literature review of well-established Since the rise of the Internet and mobile Internet, worldwide literature from journals mainly dealing with the topics of communication has become accessible at nearly no cost, for Marketing, Public Relations, Corporate Communication, almost everyone, almost everywhere and at almost all times Business Strategy such as Business Horizons, Public Relations (Nitzan & Libai, 2011). This technological development was Review, Corporate Public Relations Review, Journal of Public the basis for the establishment and of social media interaction. Relations Research and many others. Social media applications are basic instruments for The conclusion and the discussion part of this paper will interpersonal communication, communication from persons to provide the reader with a dense understanding of the research audiences or even communication with institutions. They enable field of reputation management in crisis situations in the age of to share experiences with products or services publicly by social media. This understanding will be based on the ‘seven providing a certain degree of anonymity (Krishnamurthy & functional building blocks of social media’ as discussed by Kucuk, 2009). Kietzmann, Hermkes, McCarthy and Silvestre (2011), which For the field of reputation management this implicates that serves as base frame for the understanding how organizations stakeholders are able to communicate about issues concerning a are or can be affected by social media. The ‘Situation Crisis particular company nearly effortless by using social media. The Communication Theory’, abbreviated as SCCT, that has been importance for businesses of this change becomes clear when established by Coombs (2004) serves as a guidance through the they realize that “Anyone can say anything about any topic” identification and categorization as well as reaction and (Allemang & Hendler, 2011). As Osswald, Portmann, and response parts of this research. Since this model is already a Meier (2011) mention, this means that even if a person does not very basic element in the topic of crisis communication and has have explicit knowledge about a topic he talks about online, his constantly been further developed, it is a very vivid object, word can be spread around the world. Another important, and which fits perfectly in the vivid domain of reputation maybe the most important, change is the shift of control about management in social media. The theory of this model will be an organizations’ information that is discussed publicly. As reframed in the context of social media interaction by the Gaines-Ross mentions in 2010, is criticism not anymore creation cross connections based on literature from Mangold dependent from the information an institution provides to the and Faulds (2009), Vollenbroek, Vries, Constantinides and public. Besides that, she explains that the publicly discussed Kommers (2014) Jin and Fisher Liu (2010) and many others. In content is not always based on the truth nor does it give the total this paper is based on the research of 48 articles and criticized any advance notice. combines the gained knowledge in an integrative approach. While a companies’ reputation is fragile and dependent on past 2. LITERATURE REVIEW actions, negative information, might it be true or not, can cause To fully understand the impact social media can have on severe damage, if not an organizational crisis, in almost no organizations, this part will give an in-depth discussion of the time. Therefore such situations are handled by a companies’ elements and their functionality of social media The developed crisis management. understanding will then give a transition to the elements and Crisis management is a discipline that aims on identifying, identification of reputation threats and then be integrated in an protecting and if not possible rescuing and repairing the damage approach that aims on giving advice on reaction strategies for experienced (Benoit, 1997). As Coombs in 1998 mentions threats. should an organization utilize an analytic system that focuses on the elements of crises. While the elements and dimensions of 2.1 Elements of Social Media traditional communication have shifted significantly due to the Several researchers are nowadays describing problems that emergence of social media platforms it is necessary to adapt the organizations have when it comes to coping with social media. established strategies to the new environment. Many organizations seem to have a lack in knowledge and are mismanaging the social web experience and communication This research therefore aims on bringing together existing and (Kietzmann et al., 2011). The first step in coping with social established theories, strategies and frameworks about crisis media for an organization is to create a basic knowledge of it. management by creating a transition into the new dimensions of According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), “Social Media is a reputation threats for commercial organizations from social group of Internet-based applications that build on the media users. Although there is already a decent amount of ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that research done in this topic, yet, it was not found a model that 1 allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (p. the possibility to evaluate the reputation of users, which can be 61). With the aim to understand the features of such important